Fit for the task: complementarity, asymmetry, and partner selection in alliances

Most existing theories of relationship formation imply that organizations establish ties to procure complementary resources, and that doing so adroitly generates relational rents. Although this entails a responsibility for organizations to recognize and harness complementarity, most theories struggle with ambiguity around the concept of resource complementarity, neglect its power implications, and rely on rules of thumb that assign no role to managers’ intentions. To explain the formation of ties that successfully combine critical resources, we propose that a positive interplay among resources exists only insofar as organizations use task requirements to guide their combination. As such, a well-matched tie is one that manages task resource interdependence while offsetting imbalances in task-related resources. We test our theory on project-based, interorganizational partnerships for public construction in Italy. We find that (1) the probability of tie formation increases with the quality of the match between the task and actors’ resources; (2) there are two distinct, task-related dimensions along which this happens: depth and scope; (3) the effect of these dimensions dwarfs the effect found by measures that assess complementarity irrespective of task; and (4) the probability of tie formation decreases when a task calls for resources that potential partners possess in unequal amounts.